The Life and Afterlives of Hanabusa Itchō, Artist-Rebel of Edo by Miriam Wattles (review)

Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724) flourished in the liminal spaces of Edo. As a poet, painter, song writer, and entertainment impresario, he plied the trades of word and image. In spite of its elaborate hierarchies, the new urban culture allowed for places, often in the entertainment quarters but also within the evolving circles of avant-garde poetry, where a kind of sanctioned mixing of the classes could happen. While not a complete leave-your-social-identity-at-the-door environment, these occasions tolerated considerably more interaction than was found in daily life, and they were rich arenas for creativity. Itchō’s most frequently cited images depict a hodgepodge of folk from every walk of life crowded in a ferry crossing the Sumida River and a similar motley group bunched under the shelter of a gate to escape a sudden cloudburst (pp. 52,132–35). The unavoidable moments that obliterated forced distinctions seemed his favorites. The edginess and daring of these depictions have largely been meliorated by time, and to the casual viewer only the charm remains. As a brilliant survivor of life in and commentator on Edo’s cultural boundary lines, Itchō’s evident skills were quickness of wit and word, an exquisitely honed ability to read the barely detectable shift of mood in the eyes or posture of a collaborator or a client, a considerable but lightly worn knowledge of the Chinese and Japanese classics, and an instinct for playfulness that possessed the simultaneous dimensions of frivolity and depth.

From his arrival as a young boy in Edo around 1660 until 1698, he not only survived but was a true notable. Then, for reasons still unclear, he fell seriously afoul of the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (1646–1709) in 1698 and was sent into an 11–year exile. Those harsh but artistically productive years ended with the shogun’s death, release from exile, and a return to a career of enhanced celebrity and prosperity until his death. And then he enjoyed a particular kind of posthumous celebrity.

Artistic reputations rise and fall on the tides of taste. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present, the international market in premodern Japanese art widely victimized the subtle, literary, and deeply contextual word/image constructs such as those refined by Itchō in favor of imagery whose appreciation was immediate to the eye. Modern Japanese scholarly interest in Itchō reached peaks in the mid-1980s and, more recently, with a 2009 exhibition celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of Itchō’s return from exile. Miriam Wattles has been an attentive and creative researcher within this general resurgence of interest in Itchō, and her thorough and instructive study demonstrates why Itchō, generally regarded as an occasionally brilliant but largely second-tier figure, deserves careful consideration.

Wattles presents two quite interesting but complex bodies of information: an interpretive examination of the artist’s known elements of biography with analysis of key works, and then a study of the posthumous Itchō, remembered largely in an increasingly confected image of an antihero who suffered under and survived an intolerant regime. In the section on biography, Wattles does much to suggest in her description of the specifics of Itchō’s multiple personae as they developed before his banishment that her subject confounds standard art historical categories. Indeed, Itchō’s diversity of skills makes it difficult to determine in certain periods how he saw his primary role. Wattles serves the reader as an excellent guide to understanding the broader picture of just how a cultural legacy of word and image which had slipped from the control of its historic arbiters by the late sixteenth century seemed to float free for anyone with the ingenuity of an Itchō or the other great talents of the Genroku era (1688–1704) to fragment, reconfigure, modify, and otherwise develop. Itchō was a participant in this vast exercise of re-membering.

Wattles offers instructive passages...